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> Come to think of it, doesn't the Spatchery resemble a pistol of some kind? I know it's a long-shot, but why don't you try loading 'er up with some of those bullets?

If by 'pistol' you mean 'eighteenth-century artillery piece', then yes. Yes it does.

You put a cartridge designed for a revolver into one of the barrels of the Spratchery. It sits there, small as a gnat in a cathedral.

Nope. No way in hell that thing's going to fire.

> Okay looked up the words ( /Title) It is the apparent secret of the universe multiple people have written down under the influence of hallucinogenics. So either it could be a red herring, maybe your whole word is a drag addled hallucination and your slowly learning the secret of the universe or it's a broader hint than I thought and I need to give it more thought.
Anyway try using the Spatchery at the Quilava see what it does to it. If it does something bad do it again, and if it does something good use it on yourself and vesta

You can't really get a good shot at the Quilava from here – and you don't want to, anyway. You're pretty sure that firing the Spratchery will just send half a kilo of small fish flying through the air to be flash-cooked in the Quilava's back-flames.

Why the Narrator ever gave you this thing is entirely beyond you.

> I honestly do not know what you should do. I would suggest making a raft but the thought of an entire ocean of Eldritch sea Pokemon terrifies me, not even to mention the city at the bottom. Freaking R'lyeh and Cthulu and all that. It's scary. And why would the Dreaming even affect Pokemon? I say take the time you have right now in relative safety to sit and think. Why do you have such a bizarre repertoire of information? Isnt it a little convenient you know so much about fish and the ocean and stuff and the creepy things that screwed up the Pokemon world are ocean-based? Take some time to ponder your situation.

Yes.

It's very convenient. You could argue that you know all that because you're the Chosen One, the player character. You could argue that you know it because it was hard-coded into you at creation, just like that vague backstory was. You could even argue that you know it for reasons of narrative imperative, because let's face it no one wants to send you running around Johto looking for a library to look up species of eel.

Actually, where the hell are all the libraries in Johto? And the hospitals? And the schools? Christ, what the hell kind of country were they running before the Dreaming happened?

You rein yourself in; you're too tired to question reality right now. The sun is dipping in the sky, and the light is growing dimmer and redder; there'll be time enough for philosophy and action after you've had a sleep. Right now, you've just got enough energy to ponder, and hopefully to climb up onto the dock somehow so you can find somewhere to sleep.

Right, then. Pondering.

Why do you know all this stuff? There really only seems to be one answer: because someone wants you to. Whatever entity spawned you in New Bark spawned you with this information in your head. Therefore they wanted you to know it. Were they preparing you for what was to come? Quite possibly. That may be why certain information seems to unlock at certain points in your adventure – like scripted encounters, but in your head.

Wait, are your thoughts even making sense any more? You're not so sure they are. Is it you, or is it – actually, you realise in a moment of clarity, you're sitting on a soaking wet lump of concrete sticking out of a wind-tossed sea wearing a shredded, drenched evening dress that didn't cover much to begin with. That difficulty you're experiencing in thinking coherently is probably the onset of hypothermia.

Damn. You're really not a fan of this new realism module the Dreaming seems to have introduced.

Let's climb out of the dock somethings keeping Quilava from coming over here so it seems safe for the moment and try to slip into the dock building or a house without Quilava noticing or noticing if it's a stone building with a lockable door. Make a small fire, and use the spatchery to flash cook some fish to eat, than dry your dress while you sleep. Also I think we should turn the dress into a robe.

Oh god I forgot we were still wearing the dress. You need to get out of that. See if its at all possible to use anything in your bag to make better clothing. If the Eldritch Spinarak silk isnt all being used for gloves, see if you can make something out of it. Not only will you be better protected from the Quilava, but if it is good at keeping out heat, maybe it'll keep you warmer than a torn dress.

> Let's climb out of the dock somethings keeping Quilava from coming over here so it seems safe for the moment and try to slip into the dock building or a house without Quilava noticing or noticing if it's a stone building with a lockable door. Make a small fire, and use the spatchery to flash cook some fish to eat, than dry your dress while you sleep. Also I think we should turn the dress into a robe.

You look up. A foot or so above your head, the wooden leg terminates in a splintery mess; above that, there's a good six or seven feet of empty space, and then a ragged hole in the surface of the dock. You might just be able to squeeze through.

Well, it's not like you have a choice. There's no room to get changed here, and you have to move anyway or face a rather unpleasant death by exposure. Onwards and upwards, then!

You pull your legs up stiffly onto the concrete, then stand up, keeping one hand on the wooden post for balance. It seems sturdy enough; you're probably going to be able to stand on it. You stuff Vesta into your Bag and try to drag yourself up onto the stump, moving gingerly for fear of splinters – and then you remember the Adamantine Spider Silk wrapped around your hands, and move more assertively, safe in the knowledge that nothing is going to slice your fingers through that.

It isn't easy. You try to grip the sides of the pole with your legs, but your knees are wet and the wood slippery with brine and mould; you try and get your feet wedged into some of the notches on its sides, but they won't fit. You step back a moment, thinking, then unwrap your Novelty Giraffe Shoe (which is falling apart anyway) from your foot and hurl it into the sea; your other shoe and sock, both of which are equally ruined, follow suit.

You attempt the climb again. This time, your toes curl into the weathered gnarls of the wood, and slowly, painfully, every movement sending little starbursts of agony through your frozen arms, you pull yourself upwards. Foot up a little higher – there – reach forwards – and now—

You fall forwards onto the top of the pole, belly first; your breath is knocked clean out of you – and replaced, if the pain in your abdomen is anything to go by, with approximately fifteen billion splinters.

But hey! At least you're up here, right? Better than nothing.

For about half a minute, you lie draped over the pole as if on a skewer, and then a leaden heaviness descends on you, and you're pretty sure you can't move at all anyway, and now...

No! You blink fiercely and bite your tongue in a desperate effort to rouse yourself; the former is decidedly ineffective, but the latter sends a sharp lance of pain through your head and clears your mind a little. Get up, you think. Get up, Othodox...

You pull you knees up beneath you, hardly caring about the pain in your legs as the splintered wood scrapes across the bare flesh; now you're getting up, somehow, you're on a square foot of wood a few metres above a tempestuous ocean and somehow you're getting to your feet, you'd think your balance wouldn't be up to that but then again you were made for this, made to survive and fight and win, because you're the player character...

You open your eyes. You're kneeling atop the pole, bleeding and frozen, head slumped forwards.

Looks like you blacked out halfway through getting up. You need to be careful, you tell yourself; you can't risk falling unconscious, not here, not when the slightest mistake means falling into the sea from which you know you have no hope of extricating yourself.

You take a deep breath, and bite your lip, hard enough to draw blood. Salt and iron and your old friend pain mingle on your tongue, and for a moment your mind is clear. Clear enough to realise that if you don't get up right now, you're going to die – and that means Vesta will die, and Falkner, and the poor creature that you've started to think of as Jasmine will probably die as well of heartbreak when you fail to come back.

So.

Get up, Othodox.

It's like a mantra: you repeat it, over and over, the words throbbing in your head, unable to escape your frozen lips but washing and rebounding over the walls of your skull like the waves on the concrete below.

Get up, Othodox.

One knee up, close to your chin. You can see the blood and bits of wood sticking out, but they're minor injuries; they hurt, but it just keeps you focused, that's all, just pain keeping you focused, not getting in the way of your movement.

Wildly windmilling your arms, eyes wide and mouth open in soundless fear – but it's fine, it's OK, you got your balance back and now you're standing up, balanced on the pole like a statue on a column.

Get up, Othodox.

Looking up, reaching out; fingers on the ragged edges of the hole, gripping, tugging; it doesn't give way, seems like it will be strong enough – and you heave, and feel your feet leaving the wood.

Get up, Othodox.

You fall back down, arms suddenly weak, and if you hadn't been holding onto the wood above you'd have lost your balance and fallen into the sea. Too much, too soon – and yet you can't wait, you have to get up there, and you tighten your grip and grimly bunch your muscles.

Get up, Othodox.

Head through the gap – shoulders burning – elbow out over the dock, hooking onto the remnants of a wooden railing—

Up.

And there you are.

Lying full length on the dock, gasping for breath, half-dead with the cold and the wet and the effort, bloody sunset light across your back – and it feels good, feels so good to be up here at last where you can stretch out, but you know you can't yet stop and you climb stiffly to your feet, the odd heavy warmth of your limbs making every step a chore, and you stumble over to the old ticket office, just about avoiding the rotten planks that snap like straws at your approach, and blunder through the gap where the door used to be—

You lose your footing again because of the tilted floor – the entire building has sunk on one side, leaving it at a seventy-degree angle to the norm – and roll helplessly down into a puddle of water at the bottom. It should be cold, but it feels warm, and though you try to be scared you just can't quite manage it. You look up towards the ticket desk – still there, bolted to the floor; if you could just climb up to it, you could sit on its side, which now faces upwards, and be safe. But it's so far away, so very far away, and you're not sure you can climb the twenty feet across the floor...

You reach out with one hand and grab a fold in the mildewed carpet; it tears in your hand, leaving a neat hole in the fabric beneath, a hole that could take a hand or a dextrous foot, and, every muscle in your body having been replaced by warm rags, you can only surmise that your climb is fuelled entirely by willpower. Inch by slow inch, you ascend, the desk swelling in your sight, and then you are dragging yourself over the plastic rim and sinking onto an honest-to-God dry surface, in the crook of the desk where it meets the floor, and with a weak sigh of exultation you close your eyes...

> Oh god I forgot we were still wearing the dress. You need to get out of that. See if its at all possible to use anything in your bag to make better clothing. If the Eldritch Spinarak silk isnt all being used for gloves, see if you can make something out of it. Not only will you be better protected from the Quilava, but if it is good at keeping out heat, maybe it'll keep you warmer than a torn dress.

No.

Not yet.

You force them open again – with your fingers, as it happens; your eyelids no longer obey you. You reach for your Bag; fumble with the straps, pull out the remaining Adamantine Spider Silk. Little of your dress remains after your abrasive journey across the wood and carpet, but with a Herculean effort, you manage to flick the bigger fragments away from you. Then you draw the sheet of silk that once enshrouded the Eldritch Spinarak close around you, and give in to sleep.

---

Beneath you, the Deep Ones are marching.

They flop and flap and paddle their way through the streets of that Cyclopean city, looking like grotesque dwarves in a citadel of giants, and above them you keep pace, drifting along level with the rooftops; where you are headed you don't know, but you can see now that this is not the Deep Ones' native home. The proportions are all wrong; the buildings here are made for creatures of frighteningly prodigious size – creatures that are surely too large to exist according to all the laws of biology – and the Deep Ones are only a little more than man-sized.

Why are they here, you wonder distantly. What has brought them to this place?

You follow them through the streets, and hear the strange piping of unnameable instruments rising from the crowds below; there is a sense of occasion about the whole thing, you realise, a kind of majesty that lends even this terrible procession a faint ring of respectability.

The streets are rising.

You barely notice it at first, but it soon becomes undeniable: the city is here built on some vast hill or mountain, and the buildings themselves are getting taller, crowned with towers topped with tentacular finials; the Deep Ones are moving faster now, too, as if eager to reach the summit.

Finally, it occurs to you to look ahead, and now you see it: a single tower at the apex of the hill, rising up and up and up apparently without end, rising up so high its top fades into obscurity among the black waters above, and suddenly you know that the top of this tower sees daylight still, and that on its topmost floor is a great door that must never, ever be opened—

---

It's sunny.

You wake, blinking and exhausted, to find sunlight streaming through the broken windows of the old ticket office. It takes you a moment to remember why you're here, and a further moment to realise you're not dead.

You'd love to celebrate this, but you can't really move right now.

The Adamantine Spider Silk has trapped your body heat amazingly well, and you're snug as you can be within your cocoon – dry, too, which is fantastic. You lie there for a while, basking drowsily in a sense of relief and happiness, and then reach cautiously out of your silken bed for your Bag. If you're not mistaken, you put your regular clothes somewhere in there when you first donned the dress.

You are not mistaken, and in fact are soon dressed once more in jeans, T-shirt and jacket – though your shoes, socks and Flowery Wreath are all, regrettably, things of the past. You pull a few lingering splinters from various portions of your anatomy, and check your belly and legs for any wounds that require attention – and, thankfully, find none, just cuts and bruises.

You consider lighting a fire, but since the entire office and dock is made of wood, you think it might be a bad idea, and eat the remaining half of your cooked eel instead of trying out the Spratchery.

Check on Vesta see if she's okay and feed her a splintery plank and try to regather as much of your cocoon as you can. Than leave the ticket office, you can't cook here and it's unstable try warming up that old coffee by holding it against Vesta's Jar and drink the coffee. After you leave the building look for a building you can loot for shoes.

The player god above me must be of the mind reading sort. Allow me to don my tinfoil helmet before continuing... ... ... And done. Try and get me now!

Anyways, I agree. We need to feed Vesta as it has been some time since we last did that. I suggest using the Adamantine Spider Silk to make a crude pair of shoes, you can't walk on the splintery death trap that is the pier without a pair. After all, the gloves seem to have held up nicely so far, so why not try shoes?

Also, yes, try the heating up the coffee and drinking a bit of it to warm your hypothermia-addled self up.

I'd suggest looting, but that Quilava is still on the shore, correct? We need to do something about that.

How about that raft? Look around the ticket office and the area immediately surrounding it for supplies to make a raft, or just supplies in general. Also, remember to be paranoid; remember, while Quilava hates water, crabs tend have a fondness for it. (In other words, keep your guard up.)

> Check on Vesta see if she's okay and feed her a splintery plank and try to regather as much of your cocoon as you can. Than leave the ticket office, you can't cook here and it's unstable try warming up that old coffee by holding it against Vesta's Jar and drink the coffee. After you leave the building look for a building you can loot for shoes.

Vesta, as ever, is fine. You give her a plank, replenish your supply of them with bits of ticket office and warm up the half-cup of coffee. It looks and tastes unimaginably foul, as you probably should have expected of something that's been sitting there for several years.

Well done, Othodox.

The cocoon is entirely undamaged – it is adamantine, after all – and you fold it up and stuff it back into your Bag.

You would go and look for buildings to loot, but you're kind of stranded on a lump of wood in the middle of the ocean. There isn't even a cupboard here, let alone a shoe shop.

> Anyways, I agree. We need to feed Vesta as it has been some time since we last did that. I suggest using the Adamantine Spider Silk to make a crude pair of shoes, you can't walk on the splintery death trap that is the pier without a pair. After all, the gloves seem to have held up nicely so far, so why not try shoes?
Also, yes, try the heating up the coffee and drinking a bit of it to warm your hypothermia-addled self up.
I'd suggest looting, but that Quilava is still on the shore, correct? We need to do something about that.

You attempt to make shoes out of the Adamantine Spider Silk, but you need something to hold everything together with; your feet don't have as many handy lumps to tie the silk to as your hands. You take a tentative step, fall over and decide that perhaps you'll go barefoot for now.

You climb over to the door, travelling on all fours to keep your balance, and peep out the window. The Quilava has moved; it's down on the beach now, its teeth cracking loudly through crabshells as it feeds. Judging by the sheer quantity of bodies around it, it seems its hunger hasn't grown any less insatiable over the past couple of days; it looks like it's been eating all night. It must, you think, require a lot of energy to maintain its raging fires. You wonder idly if there's a way to exploit that, but nothing immediately comes to mind. Even if you somehow drain its energy reserves, it's mostly bone now; you're not sure it has any blood left for you to spill.

You open your mouth to reply, then realise that you don't actually have any idea.

“I don't know,” you say slowly. “I really don't know...”

Simple question, but it's a good one. Why is it after you? So far, you've just accepted its murderous nature without question, but really – why is it so determined to kill you, of all the living creatures in Johto? It's followed you across the entire country. If it just wanted an easy meal, it would have given up in Cherrygrove.

What exactly drives the Eldritch Quilava? It is your 'starter', but what does that mean, exactly?

You gaze across the choppy sea towards the beach, and the monster feasting on the blood-streaked sands.

A good question indeed.

> How about that raft? Look around the ticket office and the area immediately surrounding it for supplies to make a raft, or just supplies in general. Also, remember to be paranoid; remember, while Quilava hates water, crabs tend have a fondness for it. (In other words, keep your guard up.)

Raft. Yeah. You are so totally ready to get out of Olivine. You have had more than enough of giant enemy crabs and flaming death weasels, and you want to go south right away.

The ticket office is, regrettably, bereft of supplies, and the only thing you find on the dock outside is a black, withered lump of something that might be leather, pinned to the deck with a weathered fang.

Hmm I think Quilava is chasing you just for the thrill of the hunt, I mean you beat it once kinda, or it actually is your starter so it's bonded to you in a way. Could we make a raft using the silk and some boards from the building like line some boards together than tie them together with the silk. I mean the silk is strong as steel but light so it should float. Also what are these weird shriveled things we keep finding?

(First, I believe you meant to say "get out of Olivine and to Cianwood. Secondly,) You need to find something seaworthy. However, if you're ever going to survive an ocean of Eldritch Tentacool, Tentacruel, Staryu, and the possible Mantine, you need a more powerful weapon. I suggest combining some of your bag items with Horribly Dangerous Stabby Thing to make a better weapon.

> Hmm I think Quilava is chasing you just for the thrill of the hunt, I mean you beat it once kinda, or it actually is your starter so it's bonded to you in a way. Could we make a raft using the silk and some boards from the building like line some boards together than tie them together with the silk. I mean the silk is strong as steel but light so it should float. Also what are these weird shriveled things we keep finding?

The Weird Shrivelled Things? Hm. You're not sure. You found one in the Poké Mart and one on the dock – you're guessing they have something to do with the fact that those places appear to be feeling the effects of time. Whatever the things are, they're so old and desiccated that you can't make out much of them beyond the fact that they are black and about a foot long. You'd need to find one in better condition to ascertain what it is with any certainty, or perhaps there's another way to find out what they are that you just haven't thought of yet.

Moving on to the silk, it's actually far stronger than steel – it's actually possible to break steel, after all, and this stuff is pretty much indestructible. If only it had some structural integrity, you could make the entire raft out of it.

Hm. Actually... that might not be such a bad idea.

You go outside onto the dock and climb, with a little difficulty, up onto the roof of the ticket office; here, amid a veritable landslide of dislodged roof slates, you find a way into the attic space – where, mostly protected from above by the roof and from below by their sheer height, you find a decent number of mostly-not-rotten planks and beams.

It's difficult to rip them up, but most of them are surrounded by considerably more rotten planks, and you can break those fairly easily, allowing you to lift the unspoiled wood out of the gaps.

You climb back down, then retreat back into the ticket office, away from the Quilava, to work out what you're going to do next.

Stretching the Adamantine Spider Silk out as much as you can, you find that the largest single piece – the one that covered most of the Eldritch Spinarak – is about four metres square. It's not much, but it should be enough for you to make the skin of a little coracle out of. It also teaches you that the surface area of a spider is considerably more than it appears to be, presumably because of all those thin twiddly bits on the sides, but frankly you don't want to consider anything that reminds you of the prodigious size of the monster you killed for this silk. If you were capable of having nightmares that didn't revolve around fishmen, you'd probably find that thing haunting your dreams.

You take the wood and begin to test some of the thinner planks, bending them to see how far you can push them – but you quickly realise they aren't going to bend very far without some kind of aid.

That's all right, you think. You know how to deal with this. All the skills you needed to complete your quest – a Trainer's eye for judging a monster, a marine biologist's knowledge of sea creatures, a survivalist's instinct for, well, surviving – they've all been with you, all along. You were made to solve this problem, you realise: you are the player character, and you have all the practical skills you could ever want.

And you know how to bend wood.

There are three main methods, you tell yourself, previously-unknown knowledge unfolding in your mind. You can steam it and reshape it, which would be difficult given your lack of a steam-box and mould; you can cut it into thin strips, adjust the length of each and put them back together to create a laminated curve, which you can't do without better tools – or you can cut notches in one side of the wood, and ease the notches closed to create a tense bend.

This one you might just be able to do.

You set to work with a will, scratching rough coracle designs on the desktop with a Glass Shard, and though you break your Badly Cracked Dangerous Makeshift Knife and all your remaining Glass Shards in the process, after a hard day's work you have the notches in your planks cut to the right size. For a moment, you're stumped as to how to fasten them closed – then you remember something about Dustox scales, about how they work by reacting with the water in your tears and sweat to form a kind of caustic, burning glue, and you smile.

You know how to mix up some glue that should hold the wood together, but first you need a break; you've been working all day, and you haven't had anything to eat or much to drink. Figuring that it can't do you any harm, you drink one of your Potions, which tastes like kerosene and seems to contain about the same amount of energy, and finish off the last of your Delicious Meat Bits. They are no longer Delicious, being a little mouldy, but they are still Meat, as long as you scrape the green bits off.

Right, then. Onwards!

As the sun begins to set once more, you carefully prise open the Sealed Box of Dustox Powder and, scooping a little up with the tip of a piece of leftover wood, pour it into one of the notches you've cut. You are uncomfortably aware that if you screw this part up, you're going to burn the skin off your fingers.

Sometimes, you know, it would be nice not to have all this PC pre-programmed knowledge.

You drip a little bit of the last Potion onto it, and a sudden violent eruption of bubbles tells you the reaction is well underway; a couple of seconds later, a greenish paste has formed where the dust once was, and you press the sides of the notch together before it can harden. You hold it there for a full minute, and then, hands trembling, praying for it to stay, you take your hands away...

It holds.

There is a curve in the end of this piece of wood. It's poisonous, and you'd better never lick your boat, but goddamnit it works!

You punch the air. It seems appropriate.

doing good? asks Vesta. You've already explained to her what you're doing, but it took most of the morning to teach her the concept of a boat; since you've been able to walk pretty much everywhere so far, she really doesn't see why you can't just walk to Cianwood.

She sounds bored; while the fact that she has the capacity for boredom is great – it implies she's gaining intelligence – you don't think this boat's going to be ready for quite some time yet.

“I don't know, Vesta,” you say, sitting back for a moment and rubbing your shoulder. “This is going to take me a while.”

vesta help?

“It's sweet of you to offer, but there's not a lot you can do unless you have hands,” you reply. “Also, I think you'd set this on fire if you touched it. Sorry.”

hum. vesta sleep now, she announces, sounding vaguely offended, and burns down low to cinders. You leave her be, and continue work on the boat in a Potion-fuelled creative outpouring. What do they put in those things, anyway? You're sure something that keeps you this awake and gives you this much energy can't be legal. It's like having some toxic cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline injected straight into your heart.

By midnight, you have a series of curved wooden planks arrayed in the moonlight; you take them onto the dock, where it's flatter, so you can lay them out. The light is also better out here; the moon is full tonight. You're pretty sure it was new only a few nights ago, and wonder if the Dreaming has screwed up the lunar phases as well. It seems a pretty fair bet; it messed with pretty much everything else.

You glance over at the shore, but the Quilava is nowhere to be seen, and Olivine is dark and quiet. That seems kind of ominous, but you don't dwell on it; you have a boat to build and a world to save.

Now, you begin to assemble the skeleton of the coracle, gluing strut after strut into the ring, and soon you have something that resembles an upturned turtle shell; you flip it over (with some difficulty – it's bigger than you thought it would be) and start attaching the Adamantine Spider Silk to the underside, stretching it taut across the rods and securing each join with the last of the Dustox powder.

Man, are you lucky – there was just enough of that stuff to glue the whole lot together. It's almost like this whole thing was planned out for you.

Spooky, eh?

As the first light of dawn approaches, you step back to admire your work. Before you, on the dock, is a gleaming white silken coracle – a dangerous, unstable craft, to be sure, but it's your dangerous, unstable craft, and you made it with your own two hands. It's light, strong and, well, mostly designed for navigating rivers, but as long as you can sail it competently it'll take you to Cianwood and back. You could even carry it on your back, if you needed to.

You drag it indoors and set it in your safe haven behind the ticket desk. You don't want it being carried off in a strong wind while you sleep – and sleep you definitely need, because you've been up for a long, long time now. You curl up near your coracle and let your exhaustion wash you away into a dark and surprisingly dreamless sleep.

> You need to find something seaworthy. However, if you're ever going to survive an ocean of Eldritch Tentacool, Tentacruel, Staryu, and the possible Mantine, you need a more powerful weapon. I suggest combining some of your bag items with Horribly Dangerous Stabby Thing to make a better weapon.

No sense in going to sea unprepared. From the general trend of 'bigger and meaner' that the Eldritch Pokémon have thus far shown, you imagine encountering an Eldritch Tentacruel would be something akin to meeting the kraken. A better weapon is a must.

This thought passes through your head soon after waking, and you immediately head out onto the dock to the space where you assembled your Silken Coracle the day before. Here, you spread out your Bag items on the planks and ponder.

Hm.

Now, if you just take this apart...

And put a couple of wheels from this here...

Perhaps this could go on there?

And ram the TMs in here...

Four hours later, you have disassembled the Machine for Guessing the Number of Pips in an Unopened Orange, the My First Tri-Beam Laser GunTM and the Powerless Tablet Computer, crammed all the parts together inside the Machine's elegant casing, attached the trigger and butt from the Laser Gun and stuffed the Shiny Stone and TM23s in the middle.

What happens next is probably due to the Shiny Stone.

You raise it experimentally at the sky and pull the trigger. The LEDs from the Laser Gun light up, the TMs begin whirring manically on an axle inside, and the Shiny Stone, just visible through the exhaust grille of the Machine's casing, glows brightly as the wires around it heat up.

Light. Heat. Steel-type energy.

All combine, and a moment later a searing column of silvery light rises high into the sky, the recoil knocking you off your feet and almost into the sea.

Othodox used Flash Cannon! But there was no target...

Wait.

Seriously?

You actually managed to put those clues together, despite the way the Narrator scattered them across the entire story to date?

Damn it. He'll make sure to hide his superweapons better in future.

Whatever the Narrator thinks of the matter, you would appear to have inadvertently invented a method of synthesising a Pokémon move.

You let out a mighty whoop and are about to start blasting everything in sight for the sheer hell of it when you realise that Flash Cannon only has 10 PP, and you have no way of recharging the thing. You're going to have to be economical with your shots here.

You can purify your own water use one of the potion bottles you used fill it with water than bring it to a boil for 5 minutes than use a piece of cloth or silk and filter it and you have some drinking water , Than cook some of that paper wrapped eel or use the spatchery to make some food, Good job making a boat and weapon

In terms of fixing the radar, assuming there's a faulty connection somewhere, you could use Vesta to smelt some of the left-over metal scrap from those machines you just smacked together and use it as solder of some kind.

Also, mourn the loss of the Machine for Guessing the Number of Pips in a Unopened Orange; the most useful item in your inventory.

Apart from that, basic preparations and precautions should be taken to ensure your safety.

Don't over-celebrate the creation of the faux Flash Cannon. Remember that where you're going, Steel-types are not very effective. Still, you managed to create a Pokemon attack, suggesting this is possible with other moves. Be on the lookout for more TMs and unused machinery. For now, eat and drink. Then, try to think of a way to navigate from here to Cianwood across miles of ocean filled with dangerous Pokemon.

> I was just about to feel special because I remembered food and water, and then you place that last line…
Anyway. Drink and eat. Then check how much food and liquid you have left. Also, because this seems to be when you prepare. Try to fix your radar, it might still come in handy.
> You can purify your own water use one of the potion bottles you used fill it with water than bring it to a boil for 5 minutes than use a piece of cloth or silk and filter it and you have some drinking water, Than cook some of that paper wrapped eel or use the spatchery to make some food, Good job making a boat and weapon.

You cook some of your eel, and purify some seawater to drink. You've got two empty Potion bottles you can use to boil water in during your journey, and you have three raw eels and half a cooked one left at the moment.

> In terms of fixing the radar, assuming there's a faulty connection somewhere, you could use Vesta to smelt some of the left-over metal scrap from those machines you just smacked together and use it as solder of some kind.
Also, mourn the loss of the Machine for Guessing the Number of Pips in a Unopened Orange; the most useful item in your inventory.
Apart from that, basic preparations and precautions should be taken to ensure your safety.

Oh, mighty woe! The Machine for Guessing the Number of Pips in an Unopened Orange is gone! Oh, fie on't!

All right, that's enough of that.

It appears that electrical engineering isn't part of your built-in knowledge. Even if it were, you have no way of opening the Pokédex to get at the innards. And even if you could do that, it doesn't change the fact that part of the little radar dish has come off.

You settle for hitting it and seeing what happens. Not a lot changes, but the light that used to flash when it registers something doesn't turn on any more.

Well, at least you can see how many monsters are in the area.

You have no idea what basic preparations and precautions are, but rather than admit it you say you've taken them.

> Don't over-celebrate the creation of the faux Flash Cannon. Remember that where you're going, Steel-types are not very effective. Still, you managed to create a Pokemon attack, suggesting this is possible with other moves. Be on the lookout for more TMs and unused machinery. For now, eat and drink. Then, try to think of a way to navigate from here to Cianwood across miles of ocean filled with dangerous Pokemon.

Well, getting to Cianwood is easy. You just go south. The Whirl Islands act as a pretty good landmark, and once you've got around them you can see Cianwood itself. It's at the base of a freaking mountain; it's quite hard to miss.

The Pokémon are more of a problem, but you figure your best bet is 'run away'. Or paddle away.

Ah. Actually, you need a paddle to pilot a coracle.

Feeling faintly stupid for not thinking of it earlier, you spend the afternoon making one. It's quite hard to do that without any cutting tools or adhesives, but by very slowly planing a plank down with a handful of your rocks you end up with a lumpy, horrible thing that might just be able to steer you through the water.

Cook another one of the eels and fill one of the potion bottles with purified water, wash the coffee cup out than combine it with any silk or extra cloth your have to make a portable water purifier than feed Vesta a lot of dry wood for the trip. Than I guess set sail or shove off or whatever you do with a coracle

Give a prayer to Tabiti for safe voyage in the realm of anti-fire and feed Vesta. Be sure she isn't mad at you; she seemed rather perturbed when you were making to coracle. Talk to her as you cross the ocean; maybe she can learn some more before you get to Cianwood.

> Cook another one of the eels and fill one of the potion bottles with purified water, wash the coffee cup out than combine it with any silk or extra cloth your have to make a portable water purifier than feed Vesta a lot of dry wood for the trip. Than I guess set sail or shove off or whatever you do with a coracle

The Adamantine Spider Silk is waterproof, but one of the shreds of your Wrecked Stylish Dress does nicely.

> Give a prayer to Tabiti for safe voyage in the realm of anti-fire and feed Vesta. Be sure she isn't mad at you; she seemed rather perturbed when you were making to coracle. Talk to her as you cross the ocean; maybe she can learn some more before you get to Cianwood.

You drop the Coracle into the ocean and lower yourself into it. Then, after a quick prayer to Tabiti and a bit of fiddling with your Oar, you're drifting unstoppably out to sea to the southwest.

This is understandably vexing. It's not going to get you to Cianwood – in fact, you have no idea where it will get you, since your knowledge of geography doesn't extend further than the Johto/Kanto landmass. But your frantic paddling is useless; your boat is too small and too light to drive against the current, and already you can see the reef to the west that usually prevents people from leaving the channel that way – unless, of course, they know where the few gaps in it are.

Needless to say, you do not have this knowledge.

You paddle harder.

Othodox's Fatigue is rising!

Ah, crap.

After fifteen minutes of furious thinking, you give up and elect to let the current take you where it will. After all, the Narrator wouldn't just shove you into an impossible situation with no means of escape, would...?

Ah, crap.

Olivine fades into the distance – a little too soon for your liking, actually. In fact, the whole world seems to be fading into the distance.

Oh, you get it now. There's a fog coming on. A thick fog, gathering with unnatural speed.

A faintly green fog, which is the part that concerns you most.

It may be too late for this, but you're beginning to wonder whether or not the Deep Ones had any way of anticipating your journey. And any means of controlling the weather.

You can't think of any way to avoid whatever's going to happen, but you figure you might as well ask the voices if they have a plan before you submit to the latest taste of hell that Fate has in store for you.

With my knowledge of the works of Lovecraft, which have shown up quite often in this narrative, I would hazard the guess that, based on the fog, this could be Nyarlahotep, one of the Outer Ones, who has the ability to manifest as fog. On the other hand, this could be DaaAagoon (it wouldn't allow me to spell it correctly), a fish-god-beast-creature that appeared to have significant control over the seas. If you're really unlucky, however, you could be meeting the one and only Cthulu, in which case you're just dead. However, none of the people I mentioned above could you fight off. If you're lucky, it'll be an Eldritch Tentacool/Tentacruel that developed the ability to create green (possibly poisonous) fog. So, be prepared to fight.

Try your best to get away putting some things you don't need that floats in water ahead of you to look for deviations in the current that leads into another current that could help you get away. If there is none try rowing again if that doesn't work ready your Flash Beam Weapon and pray it's just an Eldritch Pokemon.

> With my knowledge of the works of Lovecraft, which have shown up quite often in this narrative, I would hazard the guess that, based on the fog, this could be Nyarlahotep, one of the Outer Ones, who has the ability to manifest as fog. On the other hand, this could be DaaAagoon (it wouldn't allow me to spell it correctly), a fish-god-beast-creature that appeared to have significant control over the seas. If you're really unlucky, however, you could be meeting the one and only Cthulu, in which case you're just dead. However, none of the people I mentioned above could you fight off. If you're lucky, it'll be an Eldritch Tentacool/Tentacruel that developed the ability to create green (possibly poisonous) fog. So, be prepared to fight.
> Try your best to get away putting some things you don't need that floats in water ahead of you to look for deviations in the current that leads into another current that could help you get away. If there is none try rowing again if that doesn't work ready your Flash Beam Weapon and pray it's just an Eldritch Pokemon.

Rowing doesn't work, and the only things you have on hand that float are the pieces of wood you need to feed Vesta. You snap a little bit off one of them and toss it overboard, and it's immediately swallowed up by the waves; the surface of the sea seems almost to be boiling, as if tremendous energy were vibrating up from below.

You get out your Highly Persuasive Handgun and whimper a little. It makes you feel very, very slightly better.

> Someone mentioned that the fog might be poisonous, so I reckon it might be worth a shot if
you use the wrecked dress to make some sort of mask to filter what you're breathing.
As for what to do in the grand scheme of things...I have no clue, but try not to die. Good luck.
> Basically that. Try not to die and fight hard I guess.

You've been breathing it in for about half an hour now, so you're pretty sure it isn't poisonous – if it were, you think you'd be dead. The world is an opaque greenish wall; the only thing you can see is the bulk of the coracle beneath you, a vague dark lump in the mist. You can hear the waves growing in violence and intensity, and feel it too: the skin of the coracle vibrates with every wave it crests, and the little craft is rocking back and forth so hard that you have to lie down and hold tightly onto its ribs, putting the Handgun back into the Bag. Water splashes down onto your face, and then with a horrid lurch you realise that the waves sound distant, that abruptly your boat has left the water—

—and then with a colossal slap it smacks down back onto the waves, sending spray skyrocketing all around you; one of the wooden struts splinters with the impact, and as the thunder rumbles overhead you hear a high, keening voice calling your name:

othodox!

Vesta.

“It's OK!” you yell above the roar of the storm. “We're going to be OK!”

As if to dispute this, the coracle suddenly tips up on one side, and for a moment you see the black and white ocean roaring and gnawing in mindless rage beneath you – and then you throw your weight against the other side of the boat, and feel it crash back down onto the water.

There's a bright flash of light, followed immediately by a peal of thunder, and the lightning tears the fog asunder for a brief moment; you look up and see the sky is black, just black, the clouds so dense and dark they resemble the infinity of space – and then the fog closes in again, and in the distance you hear a cry, half dinosaur's roar and half eagle's shriek, obviously distant but impossibly loud, as if it came from just behind your ear...

The next wave swamps the boat.

You're kicking, spluttering, trying to shovel water out of the little coracle with your hands, but it doesn't do anything; the boat is spinning, flying, soaring through equal parts water and air and sound and light, and in the dark you see the scaled flank of some gigantic beast pass you, stinking of fish and petrol and baying helplessly in panic, and you realise that even that huge creature is trapped in this storm, that everything in the ocean is caught up in it, and your tiny boat has no—

The next wave carries you overboard.

All other thoughts leave your head; you have to get back in the boat, have to get back onto the closest approximation to dry land there is around here; you tug on its side, trying to haul yourself up, but all you do is flip it over, pulling it over your head like a child hiding under a blanket. The storm booms hollowly outside your silken shell, and you hear again that impossible noise, the call of some titanic saurian beast, distant but loud enough that it seems to be right beside you – but now is not the time for that, and with a huge effort you overturn the boat, righting it with yourself hooked over one edge, and flop back inside it just as another wave breaks on its side, flinging a panicked pair of fish high into the air and over the boat.

You hang on grimly and close your eyes as water patters down onto your face. There's nothing more you can do.

As the next wave falls and the lightning shrieks out once more, you feel rather than see the great scaled creature pass by again; you open your eyes and see a colossal finned tail flailing above you, and watch it fall with a kind of relief.

At least, you think just before it hits the boat, you're not going to have to see the rest of the storm.

You expect to dream of the sunken city and the Deep Ones, but instead you dream of pain, and broken wings, and the sea that betrayed you. Nothing is very coherent, but by the end of it all you are in a dark place, a cool place, and your fevered thoughts are soothed by a calming wind.

---

The sighing of the waves is what wakes, you, in the end. Well – that, and the persistent nibbling on your foot.

You sit up groggily and kick limply; something squeals in surprise and lollops away from you towards the surf. A few blinks, and the world swims into focus: OK, you're on a beach, staring out at the ocean. There's something small unspeakable that might be a very young Eldritch Seel wriggling back into the sea. The sky is clear and blue, and, against all odds, you aren't dead.

You get up slowly and look around. The beach you're on is small and bordered on three sides by a sheer cliff; a couple of holes punctuate the rock face, but they don't look big enough to be anything other than Pokémon or animal burrows (though what would live in them you have no idea). There are mounds of debris scattered across the sand; mostly fish and seaweed, but some of it looks more artificial – car tyres, bits of furniture, that sort of thing. You don't see your coracle anywhere.

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